Get Serious Help for Your Mental Health
Enough with the taboos and excuses. 2020 should have shown you how poor mental health can seriously effect your life. It can kill you. If following great advice about reducing your anxiety isn’t a long term fix, you need to talk to a professional. Your depression affecting your ability to function? You need professional help.
Don’t have the finances to see someone? Maybe you only need to go once or twice to get some direction. Can you scrap up enough to do that? Can you ask someone to pay for it for you? If not, maybe there is a group in your area online that can help you through peer means.
There are peer meetings for addiction issues, people with depression and so on. Please reach out, ask someone you are close with to help you find resources. The world needs you in our ecosystem, please take your care seriously.
Pray, Pray, Pray
Trapped away from my children for four months in 2020, I did a lot of praying. Not the rote up and down stuff, but the intimate conversations with My Lord. The kind I hadn’t done in a long time. They soothed me.
Then I finally got home, got busy with fixing a huge build-up of stressful problems, and stopped those prayerful talks. Stressed to the max once again I remembered – ‘I need to talk to Allah!’ How easy we forget.
Pray does not have to happen only in ritual ways. There are so many specific duas that help us remember that we can and should always pause to pray. But just do it. Talk to Allah. Tell Him your immediate worries, hopes, plans, sorrows – it works. Intimate prayer to Allah relieves your stress and helps you act more clearly.
Nature is The Best
Studying after studying confirms that being in nature is a natural balm to your stresses. Centuries ago Muslims intentionally built gardens for their psychiatric hospitals knowing it helped to increase mental health. Go outside and find some nature.
Where I live is predominantly brown and blue (beach and desert-ish). The crashing ocean waves and embrace of the sand beneath my feet are wonderful. Sometimes I crave lush greenery and thank God our little town has a few soul satisfying greenhouses. I meander up and down ever aisle of the greenhouse, and then have a seat for as long as possible, just breathing it all in. Find nature and enjoy it.
Studies have also found that doing any of the above activities while in nature increase their effectiveness. Now, don’t go multitasking, planning an elaborate hike, with some meditative and therapeutic measures included.
Remember: multitasking is stressful! But go ahead and book a spot in something so wonderful sounding, which someone else has done the work to create. Let’s invest in our health in 2021.
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